My email address is my first and last names, separated by a period, followed by “@gmail.com”. My name is Turkish. I grew up half there, half in the US. Most people, when speaking English, pronounce my first name using the two English words “sin” and “on”: “sin-on”. The last name sounds like “dor-uh-mudge-uh”.

NEW! Two papers on the problem of logical omniscience for probabilism: The first develops a positive view a greater length. The second focuses on criticizing existing approaches, including the view that logical omniscience is a reasonable requirement on “ideal rationality”.

A main interest of mine is the practical function of epistemic evaluations.

In my paper “Reverse Engineering Epistemic Evaluations”, I raised a puzzle about what function our use of the word ‘rational’ could serve. How does our use of ‘rational’ help us pursue true beliefs if ‘rational’ doesn’t mean ‘reliable’? Why do we use ‘[ir]rational’ to criticize some reliable people (Norman the unwitting clairvoyant) and praise some unreliable people (the brain in a vat)? To solve the puzzle, I introduced a view that I call epistemic communism: we use epistemic evaluations to promote coordination among our basic belief-forming rules, and the function of this is to make the acquisition of true beliefs by testimony safe and efficient. Coordinated believers don’t need to waste resources vetting each other for reliability.

I developed this view further in my paper “Communist Conventions for Deductive Reasoning”. In that paper and the three others listed below, I explore the implications of epistemic communism and of other more general views of the functional role of epistemic evaluations. I believe this function-oriented approach has fruitful applications to many apparently intractable issues in epistemology. These issues include the explanation of what makes deductive reasoning rational, problems of memory and forgotten evidence, and the uniqueness/permissivism debate.

(The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, eds. Delia Graff Fara and Gillian Russell, (2012)) Abstract: this is an opinionated introduction to the current debate about apriority. I focus on critically examining meaning-based explanations of how we acquire apriori justification.